Dennis Harvey

Docmeister Arthur Dong brings empathetic balance and emotional heft to the discord between fundamentalist Christian parents and their gay children.

You’re Next is fairly light on psychological and narrative complexity, but it’s still a good cut above the slasher norm, with a firm grasp on visceral action and the wisdom to place tongue slightly in cheek when things go further over the top.

Actor Philip Barantini’s first directorial feature is nothing wildly original in content or style. Still, it punches both elements across with a satisfying low-key confidence, and does not shrink from occasionally letting things get pretty rough.

Cohn handles all the performers very deftly.

Though this tale of a new widow’s apparent haunting gets progressively lost in a narrative maze that’s complicated without being particularly rewarding, director David Bruckner suffuses the action with enough dread and unpleasant goosings to make this an above-average genre exercise.

Compelling enough while you’re watching it, frustrating then forgettable once it ends, this is a work that wouldn’t command much attention if it came from any other director. Coming from this one, it mostly intrigues as an unexpected if not terribly rewarding change of pace.

A sparely plotted, low-key but ultimately rewarding slice of South Dakota reservation life.

Engrossing pic is impressively shot, edited and scored.

Among several recent documentaries about Detroit, the elegiac Detropia is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing, if not the most informative or insightful.

This is a well-cast, artfully handled effort that exercises sufficient restraint to really earn its requisite laughter and tears.

Competently mounted yet plodding, it’s manifestly a labor of love that becomes a bit of a labor to watch.

Paranormal succeeds in staying unnervingly "real."

While no doubt a more evenhanded documentary remains to be made on this issue, the Takatas’ effort is polished and convincing on its own terms.

Well-made if not particularly insightful docu should be catnip to Phishheads, while the previously unconverted are likely to stay that way.

While Carpinteros is strong enough in atmosphere and assembly, it’s limited by characters who aren’t developed with great complexity, and a climax that pours on a little too much credulity-stretching hyperbole. The result is a drama that, while OK, falls short of being truly memorable.

The sense of immediacy and excitement is contagious.

Never less than gripping as an account of what happened and what went terribly wrong.

American Woman isn’t dull, but the narrative feels more over-stuffed than surprising, and the packaging busy rather than evocative. There’s no unifying directorial tone or stylistic tact to lend the film the symphonic grandeur it sometimes appears to be aiming for.

What makes this involving beyond its subject's slightly freakish fascination is helmer Ilana Trachtman's capturing of a complex family dynamic in which Lior isn't the only intriguing personality.

Despite its handsome look and good thesping workout for Sam Rockwell, the story stretches a bit thin over feature length.

Winningly unpretentious tale uses a wispy romantic narrative as a vehicle for attractive original tunes.

What keeps the film from being anything more than an enterprising but minor diversion is that, with Shawn being is such a loud comic character from the get-go, scares and laughs alike don’t have much space to build. Winter gives his all, entertainingly so. But the performance is also dialed too high, too soon, its ultimate payoff diminished because we’ve already had so much of this protagonist screaming, bragging and sniveling.

It’s all quite nicely handled by Adams’ direction and his script (co-written with Jeremy Phillips), though the latter ultimately somewhat disappoints.

This superficially diverting tangent is too convoluted and tonally wobbly to leave a lasting impression.

Though lacking the emotional depth and almost epic scope that made “Henry Fool” loom so large after Hartley’s anecdotal, idiosyncratic early features, Ned Rifle is a far more satisfactory extension of its memorable characters than the misbegotten “Fay Grim.”

Providing an inspiration for active retirement, the ex-Harlem Renaissance chorus girls profiled in docu Been Rich All My Life are still shaking booty while most of their contemporaries can only shuffle their walkers.

Aesthetically, too, Norbu’s film offers steady, muted levels of intoxication, giving constant pleasure while never quite tipping into flamboyance.

Lacking any obvious thematic or emotional arc, compilation pic succeeds as a pure exercise in visual stimulus, its narcotic effect much amplified by Michael Gordon's thunderous, dissonant orchestral score.